Goodfellowe MP (2 page)

‘That all?’ rasped the image executive, swaying slightly. ‘Give me more. Tonight’s a big night.’

Zhu ducked down again and bobbed back up with a second twist. ‘Plenty strong, even for big man like you,’ he chuckled. He exposed the additional powder before carefully rewrapping both parcels. He looked deep into the executive’s eyes, which were glazed, focusing in a laboured manner. The breath smelt desiccated, dried by too much red wine. Uncle Zhu decided to add another fifty per cent to the first price he’d thought of.

‘Hundred and fifty.’

Surprisingly, Uncle Zhu’s accent coped with figures far better than any other aspect of the English language and it appeared to be the first part of the transaction the customer even partially understood.

‘A hundred and fifty what?’

‘Pounds. Hundred and fifty pounds,’ Uncle Zhu responded.

‘What? For two tiny packets?’ the customer continued, picking up the twists in the hand that was not holding the money.

‘Very genuine. Very rare.’ Zhu extended his hand for payment, a gesture which the customer, a man of overactive imagination and Bruce Lee fantasies, somehow translated as a demand with menace.

‘You’re ripping me off, you little yellow bastard. You’re not getting me. Shouldn’t be here in the first place.’ He began to back out towards the door. ‘Bet you’re an illegal, no work permit. You wouldn’t dare call the police.’

At this point Uncle Zhu let forth a minor hurricane of untranslatable Cantonese but made no move to come out from behind the protection of his counter. Instead it was Jya-Yu who chased after the fleeing customer, catching hold of his sleeve as he reached the end of the alley and was about to disappear into the crowded street. A shouting match ensued as Jya-Yu continued to tug at his arm and a small crowd rapidly gathered, although no one attempted to intervene, not even Uncle Zhu who had at last left the protective custody of his apothecary and stood remonstrating from the end of the alleyway. The noise level grew.

‘What’s going on here, then?’ A new voice had entered the fray. ‘All right, all right. Cut it out or I’ll nick the both of you.’ The local constabulary had arrived but, at first, seemingly to little effect. Uncle Zhu maintained his stream of abuse, gesticulating at the man, while Jya-Yu, whose English was normally at least passable, found her control of the language falling to pieces in the excitement. Around them the voluble gathering of Chinese traders and foreign tourists offered noise but no greater understanding. Puzzled, the constable turned to the image executive. ‘Perhaps you can explain, sir?’

The sight of the blue uniform had had a remarkable effect upon the young man. His voice had lost all trace of its contemptuous tone while the glaze had disappeared from his eyes, which were now sharp, calculating. ‘Damned if I know, officer. I was just walking back to my office for a meeting when this girl comes up. Says for a hundred and fifty she’ll give me anything I want. When I said I wasn’t interested she starts having a go at me.’

The youthful constable examined Jya-Yu. She didn’t look much like a tart. Very little make-up, a vigorously coloured silk jacket that was perhaps a little gaudy. Anyway, most Chinese vice was kept very much to themselves, not paraded out on the streets. Maybe she was an amateur, doing a little freelancing. ‘You’re saying she propositioned you for sex, sir?’

‘Absolutely. Anything I wanted, any way I wanted it. She’s a hooker.’ He sniffed righteously. ‘But I don’t go in for that sort of stuff.’

At that point Jya-Yu, unable to express herself in any other fashion, launched herself at the man, clubbing at him, scratching. Uncle Zhu resumed his screaming and the crowd began to press closer. It was the sort of situation where a young constable might lose both his helmet and his reputation. He radioed for back-up.

It was as the constable stepped in to separate Jya-Yu from the executive that he noticed a small packet fall to the ground. A silver twist which, on closer inspection, contained a white powder he couldn’t identify. Not for certain, at least, not until it had gone for testing, but he reckoned he was already way ahead of the forensic lab at Lambeth.

‘Yours, sir?’ he asked the executive.

‘Mine? Never!’

‘Miss?’ the constable turned to Jya-Yu, but all he got was a stream of untranslatable abuse and a further indiscriminate pounding of fists. He was still holding her wrists when the wagon arrived and a WPC took control of the struggling girl. Jya-Yu was led to the cover of the alleyway where she was searched. That’s when the police discovered two things.

The first was that, in the confusion, the executive had disappeared.

The other was that in Jya-Yu’s jacket pocket, where the executive had thrust it during the struggle, was the second twist of powder.

The retired actuary from Margate had still not budged, mesmerized by the swaying of the windscreen
wipers, still desperately surfing his switches, wits dulled by the insistent horns of complaint which surrounded him. Up to this point he’d always been censorious about drink-driving; now he considered it might be the only option.

Meanwhile the Silver Dawn had eased away and already Corsa’s attentions had been dragged elsewhere. There were always reasons for his attentions to be dragged elsewhere. As Chairman of the Granite News Group (‘one of Europe’s most rapidly expanding and profitable newspaper publishing companies’, as his annual report proclaimed), he lived on a diet of distractions. A headline on a front page. A detail in a corporate report. Finance. His charitable works, or perhaps an engaging woman, both of which he used for public effect. Then there was the new headquarters complex in Docklands. And more finance. Much More Finance.

The newspaper world had changed almost beyond recognition in recent years, somehow skipping over several stages of the industrial revolution. A world that had once been centred on the Gothic wine bars and union chapels of Fleet Street had, in the shadows of night and through the legs of wild-eyed pickets, been shifted out into several large cakes of concrete scattered along the banks of the Thames. Printing presses and distribution operations, traditionally run by the Spanish practices of the union fathers and manned by phantoms and cartoon characters, were now run by New World Control Systems Inc of Korea and scarcely required manning at all.

Corsa had been a prominent rebel in this revolution
– ‘a modern-day Merchant of Venice who has fallen upon more refined table manners,’ as the
Investors Digest
had once jibed. The sensitive souls over at the Commission for Racial Equality must’ve been out to lunch that day and missed the point, but anyone of consequence in the newspaper industry understood. Corsa wasn’t ‘one of us’. Could never be. Bad blood. His father, the founder of the Granite Group, had been an Italian and a prisoner of war who had lost patience with his countrymen’s predisposition to chaos during his one-sided battle with Montgomery and sandflies in the deserts of North Africa. His flight from the true path had been encouraged still further by his POW indenture on a Norfolk farm, where he had come to admire the English, their inherent reserve and particularly the fair-skinned daughters. So Papa had stayed on. His admiration, however, was not always reciprocated in a country still struggling with food queues and black-market nylons. Many simply took the view that Papa Corsa was and would always be a first-generation wop and, still worse, an uppity wop at that. So he’d been cautious, conservative, bought a share in a failing local newspaper and slowly created what became a modest-sized yet comfortably successful newspaper operation. But no knighthood, certainly no peerage, none of the public respects normally accorded to newspaper proprietors and not even much of the fear, not even after he had rescued the ailing
Herald
and restored it to significance amongst the Fleet Street dailies. But Papa wasn’t bitter. ‘If we’d gone back to Italy to run newspapers there,’ he would explain in his pasta accent
to his Winchester-educated son, ‘we’d probably be sweating in a prison cell along with all the rest. Be happy with what we have, Freddy.’

Yet Freddy never was. He’d resented being two inches shorter than all the others at school, no way was he going to have others look down on him after he’d joined the family firm. ‘I bought my manners in Winchester,’ he would later relate with his habitual smile, ‘but I bought my boots in Naples. And neither place sold much scruple.’ Freddy developed an appetite as sharp as a flensing knife and, at the age of thirty-five, pushed his way past his ailing father to usurp the Granite chair, vowing that the Corsas would never again be ignored. In less than five years Freddy had been as good as his word. He had turned the starched and stuffy
Herald
into a tabloid, added an evening edition and several hundred thousand to its circulation, and bought a series of regional and magazine titles to support it until Granite had matched its corporate claim about being ‘one of Europe’s most rapidly expanding newspaper publishing companies’. Still not in the premier league, perhaps, but well on the way. Trouble was it had not, in spite of the hyperbole, also become ‘one of the most profitable’. He’d borrowed dear and floated the new Granite Group in a sea of debt, only to see interest rates rise and paper costs spiral. Advertising revenues had shattered, while his competitors took him on in a series of desperate price-cutting wars.

And then it got worse. Just as all the froth and fizz was leaking away from the newspaper market the Government had announced, at the insistence of its
masters in the European Commission, that it would introduce a new Press (Diversity of Ownership) Bill designed to break the stranglehold which in the view of Monsieur Bourgeois, the Commissioner, was enjoyed and abused by the largest newspaper groups. ‘Competition, not cartel!’ Monsieur B had declared with Gallic fervour and the British Government, almost alone in Europe, had taken him seriously. So the legislative knee was bent. Observers, unused to the inverted logic that a Government should push around the media, predicted conflagration. Having lit the blue touch paper, the Government would now be expected to retire.

But the expected open warfare failed to materialize. The biggest players, already frustrated by the diminishing returns on their investments in newspapers, were growing increasingly distracted by new adventures. ‘I’ve packed my rucksack,’ one of Corsa’s fellow moguls had muttered over lunch in the Savoy Grill, explaining his decision to desert the rock face of Fleet Street for the fertile ground of cable television. ‘This ledge on which we press barons live has given us a great view, but it’s grown too damned draughty for my comfort. Time to find a new perch.’

They’d had their fun and now the big boys seemed almost content to dump a few titles – to the advantage of the second-rank players like Corsa. Or so it seemed. During the first week of the announcement he’d vociferously supported the new Bill and the opportunities it represented to pick up still more titles and move into the big time. By the second week, however, the prospective sales had served only to
drag down share prices across the sector, including the price of Granite shares. Shares that Corsa had used to guarantee his huge bank borrowings. Whoops.

The bankers. Let me die alongside my bankers! That way I’ll be sure to take the bastards with me … They’d called a meeting for next week, wanted to discuss the covenants he’d given them for the most recent thirty million pounds. No problem. Not yet at least. He’d get through that one as he’d got through all the discussions with his bankers over the last eighteen months. Encourage them with praise, confuse them with inflated prospects, weigh them down with paper, above all allow them to be deceived by their own voracious appetites and ambitions. Corsa had added so many new companies and newspaper titles to the Granite chain that there had never been two consecutive balance sheets that were comparable. Assets, valuations, hypothecations and depreciations, he’d moved them all around the financial chess board with a speed that left his opponents, and occasionally even himself, bemused. No one knew that so much of the bottom line of the Granite accounts which he proudly proclaimed as profit existed only on paper. No one knew, not yet. But they would. In those silent moments at the very end of day, when sleep eluded him and darkness allowed ghouls and hobgoblins to prey, he knew his time was running out.

They were passing the statue of King Charles I which stood at the end of Whitehall looking down towards the parliament buildings. The Killing Field, where they had taken the King one freezing January
morning, paraded him before the crowd and chopped off his head. Where so many others had found their ambitions and abilities dragged in the dust behind the baying mob. The men of the media were kings now. But here of all places he knew that even kings could fall. Torn to pieces and hurled onto the rocks which lay below the crumbling cliff face. He needed a lifeline. And in a hurry. He glanced at his watch. Already he was late.

‘Downing Street,’ he prompted his driver impatiently.

By the time Goodfellowe had parked his bike in the rack at the front of Speaker’s Court he was out of breath and the third toe on his left foot was developing a blister. It was almost seven o’clock, a series of votes lay ahead of him stretching into the night, and he knew he was in danger of being late. He couldn’t remember what they were voting about but there would be trouble if he didn’t make it to the division lobby in time, so he was trying to hurry. Even on a good day the Government’s majority stretched only to nine and there had been few good days recently. Two colleagues on the Government backbenches were recovering from heart attacks, another had had an attack of conscience after his constituency association failed to reselect him, while a fourth was under attack from the tabloids for multiple philandering. She hadn’t been seen in Westminster since the last issue of the
Sunday People
, hoping in vain that colleagues and correspondents would lose interest in her reported non-culinary uses
of lo-fat banana yoghurt. It was at times like these that Whips lost their sense of humour. He wondered whether in another life Madame Tang had been a Whip. Or merely a cat castrator. He’d better hurry.